Nga Than

Abhishek Gupta, Iga Kozlowska, Nga Than

This paper outlines a conceptual framework titled The Golden Circle that describes the roles of actors at individual, organizational, and societal levels, and their dynamics in the content moderation ecosystem. Centering harm reduction and context moderation, it argues that the ML community must attend to multimodal content moderation solutions, align their work with their organizations' goals and values, and pay attention to the ever changing social contexts in which their sociotechnical systems are embedded. This is done by accounting for the why, how, and what of content moderation from a sociological and technical lens.

Andrew Bennett, Dipendra Misra, Nga Than

Topic models are widely used in studying social phenomena. We conduct a comparative study examining state-of-the-art neural versus non-neural topic models, performing a rigorous quantitative and qualitative assessment on a dataset of tweets about the COVID-19 pandemic. Our results show that not only do neural topic models outperform their classical counterparts on standard evaluation metrics, but they also produce more coherent topics, which are of great benefit when studying complex social problems. We also propose a novel regularization term for neural topic models, which is designed to address the well-documented problem of mode collapse, and demonstrate its effectiveness.